A new study suggests that ‘pill mills’ crackdown in Florida has saved thousands of people. Due to the crackdown, there were fewer heroin overdose and narcotic painkillers deaths, it reported.

Pill mills are those doctor-run clinics where physicians allegedly recommend narcotic painkillers for cash. In most of the cases, doctors prescribe painkiller, such as Percocet, Oxycontin and Vicodin, even without examining an individual.

The crackdown on pill mills in Florida led to over 1,000 fewer deaths in approximately 34 months, as per the study. Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and lead author of the study, said, “Curbing the operation of pill mills may be an effective way for states to reduce prescription narcotic overdose death rates and total narcotic overdose death rates”.

Deaths from the overdose of heroin and narcotic painkillers have reached a level that cannot be ignored, and the main culprit is pill mills, Alene Kennedy-Hendricks added. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found an association between new law and drop in overdose deaths.

The authors of the study said they found that about 90% doctors who bought the most oxycodone in the country were from 90 out of 100 doctors. An earlier study also revealed that primary care physicians were narcotic painkillers’ biggest prescribers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced earlier that overdose drug death rate recently hit a new high. In 2014, more than 47,000 people in the America lost their lives due to drug overdoses, as per the report.